Almost Love Page 8

  None of them spelt out that Claudia’s interpretations of the McRae Stone languages were inspired by what Juliet recognised as an extreme variety of fascism.

  If Claudia had had strong political convictions prior to the discovery of the stone, they were not reflected in her work. Now her purpose seemed to be to prove that the ‘super-race’ theory could be endorsed by how early peoples used language.

  The Orkney collection of papers was published very quickly, in the space of the few months immediately preceding the outbreak of the Second World War. Most of them described the McRae Stone and hypothesised about its significance in some way. They were published in Archaeologica Orkneia, a learned journal owned by a small local history publisher taken over in the 1970s by a political foundation that had subsequently digitised most of its publications and made them available free on the Internet. The last of Claudia’s McRae Stone articles, published in the spring of 1939, had a co-author: Doctor Elida Berg. Juliet immediately googled her name.

  Doctor Berg had evidently been a famous academic. She had worked at Oslo University and her name had been given to one of the public lecture theatres built there between the wars. Juliet could find little about the exact role that she had occupied at the university, nor her dates of tenure, but a search produced a number of learned articles, some of which were available free of charge, others only by subscription. Most were in Norwegian. Juliet printed out some of the free ones and saved the URLs of others in her ‘favourites’, thinking that she might need to have them translated. She skimmed quickly through the fifty or so pages that she had printed. Some contained tiny photographs. One was of an archaeological dig: it was very blurred and the features of its subjects indistinct; nevertheless, the forms of two ladies could be made out, both squatting in a trench, their faces in shadow from the broad bush hats that they were wearing. One was heavily built and untidily dressed; the other was slender and looked rather well-groomed, despite the circumstances. Both were looking straight at the camera and smiling. Juliet could understand enough from the Norwegian caption to confirm that the photograph depicted Doctor Berg and a ‘colleague’, Miss Claudia McRae.

  Returning to her Claudia searches, Juliet discovered that Claudia had abandoned the last of her Mesopotamian digs early in 1938, leaving it unfinished. She announced when she left that she had no plans to return and attributed her failure to complete the excavation of the site to lack of funds. Juliet reflected that, prior to this, Claudia always seemed to have been able to attract funds from rich men and foundations, but the excuse might have been genuine, given that Europe and the Middle East were about to be plunged into war. Perhaps Claudia had been advised – or warned – to relinquish the site by the Foreign Office. It was equally possible that she had found something – or someone – else that drew her elsewhere.

  Tim dropped by at that moment.

  “Having fun?” he asked. “Have you found any skeletons in Claudia’s closet?”

  “That’s a funny thing to ask about an archaeologist,” said Juliet, “but the answer is, maybe. The impression I’m getting is that in her heyday Claudia was a volatile and emotional woman who was quite keen on giving her work universal significance by combining her findings with the creation or endorsement of pseudo-disciplines and movements. First among these was a version of the Aryan ideal, but derived from the notion of a perfect language rather than physical superiority.”

  “She was right wing, then?”

  “I think so – though she may not have expressed her beliefs in that way to herself. Her work is such a strange mixture of erudition and specious pleading that it is difficult to tell. Since you’re here, can you tell me whose side Norway was on during the war?”

  “As a country, officially it was neutral. However, it was occupied by the Germans and, in practice, many Norwegians were Nazi sympathisers. There were reprisals after the war: some of them were prosecuted for treason.”

  “What about academics? Which side would they normally have been on?”

  Tim shrugged.

  “Both, I suppose. There were some famous socialist academics who resisted the Germans. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I think that the whole tenor of Claudia McRae’s work may have been altered by a relationship that she developed with a female Norwegian academic: a woman called Dr Elida Berg. I don’t know much about her yet. I’ve found some journal articles that were written by her, but they’re all in Norwegian. We need to get some of them translated. I suspect that they peddle similar theories about race, class and language that Claudia’s own work tries to do at this time. It’s quite unlike what she wrote before about 1938 – which was when she and her team discovered what has become known as the McRae Stone, incidentally. Have you heard of it?”

  “I’m not sure – it rings a vague bell. Do you know for sure that Claudia was in Norway during the war?”

  “No, I’m still checking.”

  “Well, carry on – don’t let me stop you! And thank you for doing this. I suppose that she didn’t have to be in Norway in person in order to adopt these views,” he added, almost to himself. “The woman that you speak of could have come here. Or they could just have shared ideas, however academics did that then: by post, I suppose, or telephone? And conferences, when there wasn’t a war on?”

  Juliet laughed.

  “I’ll let you know, sir,” she said. “Don’t put thoughts into my head that I can’t prove. I need to stay objective about this.”

  She carried on with her work. Despite trying a variety of search techniques, she could find very little about Claudia’s activities during the war. Perhaps she was not working as an archaeologist then, but had been assigned to some kind of war work. There wasn’t much available on Dr Elida Berg for these years, either, but there was no reason to believe that she had left her post at the University of Oslo. Its curriculum was evidently undisturbed by the German occupation. However, if she published any papers in the years 1939 – 1948, the searches were not flagging them up, which was strange considering how prolific Dr Berg had been in the previous decade.

  By the mid-1950s, Claudia was a sort of archaeological superstar. She had become the figurehead of a prototype feminist movement which was also supported by a new generation of self-consciously egalitarian male academics. There were many black-and-white pictures of Claudia in full flood at academic symposia and conferences. By the 1960s, she had gathered around her a coterie of adoring young men. Two of them had already figured in the police investigation: Oliver Sparham and Edmund Baker. Juliet was not particularly surprised by this revelation: Tim had already noted that each of them had a long-term association with the vanished woman and she had expected their names to crop up eventually. The contexts in which they featured seemed innocuous enough: they had participated in digs that had taken place in both the UK and Europe. There were the usual pictures of them standing knee-deep in trenches wearing shorts and sunhats. In some of the photographs, Claudia was posing with them or looking on benevolently as they wielded their shovels. (By the mid-1950s, she had become a bulky, shapeless woman, though still striking of countenance, who dressed most of the time in workman’s overalls.) But the accounts of the digs that Edmund and Oliver and the other young men had worked on were innocent of any political message that Juliet could divine; most were matter-of-fact accounts of excavations that had taken place at the sites of prehistoric farming communities, including some in the Orkneys. There had been no more finds of the calibre of the McRae Stone. Most of the accounts managed to mention the Stone, presumably to increase readership of these later digs by lending archaeological ‘sex appeal’, but none recapitulated Claudia’s semantic theories in detail.

  This did not mean that Claudia was not still actively propounding her views, however. During the 1950s and 1960s, she had been invited to give a succession of high-profile public lectures – the Sir Maximus Wheelwright Memorial and BBC Longbourne Lectures in En
gland, the keynote presentation at the Holyrood House Symposium in Scotland, the opening speech at the Fine Gael Conference in Ireland. She had also, rather peculiarly, been presented with the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse Anglaise in 1962 for her writings, though Juliet believed – and her researches confirmed – that this award was usually conferred only on writers of fiction, drama and poetry. Juliet could find no explanation on the Femina magazine’s website for its departure from tradition, but the award had evidently increased Claudia’s reputation yet further. In 1963, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in 1965, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She gave a series of radio broadcasts on her work in the Orkneys in 1968 and, in the early 1970s, she was the chief commentator for a long-running BBC Two television programme entitled Digging up Britain’s Past. Her fame seemed to have reached its apogee at this point. She was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Cambridge, the first British university to offer archaeology as a degree, and also accepted one from Cardiff University. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the New Year’s Honours list in 1975. Thereafter, mention of her and her publications and appearances began to drop off.

  There was something missing from this glittering roll-call of achievements, Juliet realised. Aside from the honorary degree from Cambridge, which had been presented by a Vice-Chancellor who dabbled in archaeology, there were no accolades from the chief luminaries of the discipline of archaeology itself. Juliet did not know who they were, but was correct in her assumption that they would be easy enough to find. Further Google searches revealed that eminent archaeologists usually belonged to, and were accorded honours by, at least one of three august and long-established organisations: the Society of Antiquaries, the British Archaeological Association and the Royal Institute of Archaeology. A painstaking trawl of their past and present members and of the honorary memberships that they had conferred yielded no mention of Dame Claudia’s name. Juliet reflected that Claudia had been active in her field a long time ago and such organisations did not necessarily post records of all their past members. Nevertheless, the absence of any mention on their websites of such a seminal twentieth-century archaeologist was strange. Juliet recalled Oliver Sparham’s comment, as reported by Tim, that Claudia and organised societies did not mix. Apparently, she had briefly been an honorary member of the Spalding Archaeological Society, but was now estranged from that, too. Juliet sensed that if she could find out why Claudia had not been honoured by her chosen profession it might shed some light on the mystery of her disappearance.

  A first step would be to find out what kind of messages Claudia had been promoting to her vast and ever-growing popular audiences between the end of the war and the mid-seventies. An initial search brought up more journal articles, for some of which only the abstracts were available to non-subscribers. However, some were also reproduced online in full. Juliet skimmed two or three of these and discovered that the hypotheses that they were presenting were identical to those of the immediate pre- and post-war articles that she had already found; some were even couched in exactly the same language. She knew that this was odd; her experience of academic didacticism was limited to what she had read during the course of her own reasonably conscientious undergraduate career, but even this cursory acquaintance with the workings of erudition had demonstrated to her that academic theories rarely stood still. Most academics modified and embellished their theories and hypotheses over time, or were constrained to do so by the publication of the counter-theories of their peers. In contrast, what Claudia had divined from the discovery of the McRae Stone and her interpretation of its writings had been frozen in time. In 1978, her conclusions, and even the way in which she expressed them, were almost exactly the same as they had been in 1938. Although quite intricately argued (but with what Juliet considered to be a flawed logic), they could be summarised in a single sentence: that several languages had developed alongside each other in prehistoric Northern Europe, one of which was far superior in its ‘purity’ and power of expression to the others, and that the speakers of this language had become a super-race whose descendants now inhabited Northern Britain, parts of Scandinavia and other Northern European countries.

  She wanted to hear Claudia’s own voice propounding this theory and tried to find one of her radio or television broadcasts. She couldn’t locate either. However, by typing the words ‘Claudia McRae’ into YouTube, she came upon something more startling than she had anticipated.

  Juliet had located a film – or, to be more accurate, a podcast – of some kind of ceremonial occasion. It began with a grainy picture of several hook-nosed, grave and elderly men sitting at a table on a podium. Then the camera moved jerkily to capture a shot of the audience: row upon row of people seated in a huge auditorium. They appeared to be predominantly male, although the poor quality of the podcast made it difficult to establish this for sure. A few of the faces were framed with long hair, so probably belonged to women.

  The men on the podium were speaking in a language that Juliet did not understand, but which she knew from the titles at the beginning of the podcast was Norwegian. They each rose in turn to give a short speech, encouraged by the smiling faces of the others. As each individual concluded his speech and prepared to resume his seat, his fellows led the audience in a booming roar of applause. Finally, the tallest and most distinguished-looking of them – the one who appeared to be the Master of Ceremonies – strode temporarily out of view. When the camera picked him up again, he was standing behind a lectern at the far end of the podium, beaming and clapping his hands, which were held ostentatiously aloft as the whole auditorium erupted once again.

  A powerfully-built, untidy woman clambered up the three or four steps of the podium. The Master of Ceremonies ceased clapping and stretched out his hand, which she took in her own and pumped up and down. The Master of Ceremonies said a few more words and returned to his place among the dignitaries.

  The stout woman planted herself squarely behind the lectern and adjusted the microphone. She began to speak. Her first few words were delivered in Norwegian. Then she began to speak in English. At first her words, although obviously delivered full-strength to a microphone, were difficult to distinguish, but when Juliet adjusted the sound regulators on the headphones that she was wearing she could hear them more clearly.

  Dame Claudia McRae was obviously accepting some kind of honour. However, the speech that she was making was far from gracious. She was happy to receive the award ‘on behalf of the work that she had done, and on behalf of her staunch supporters and like-minded thinkers’, but she warned that others were out to sabotage their work, and that they would need to exercise vigilance at all times. To Juliet, her words sounded paranoid, but they seemed to go down well with the audience. Despite the stern tone of the speech, it was relatively short. When it had ended, the audience rose as one and gave her a standing ovation. The roar of the clapping was deafening. Then the Master of Ceremonies appeared again and presented her with a gold statuette and an envelope. Juliet knew from the snippets that she had gleaned from the speech that she had just heard that the envelope contained a cheque for $100,000 to enable Claudia’s work to be continued.

  The camera zoomed in on her at that moment and managed to capture a close-up of her face. Her great age, which had previously been camouflaged by her robust figure and booming voice, suddenly became apparent. Who was going to carry on her work, Juliet wondered? Surely no-one would give so large a donation to a nonagenarian in the belief that she would herself continue to work as an archaeologist in the field.

  Almost immediately, she discovered what might have been the answer to her question. As the applause died down, a man younger than those seated appeared at the steps of the podium and extended his hand to help Claudia walk back down them. Juliet noticed for the first time that she had propped a stick against the lectern and that she was a little unsteady on her feet. A well-groomed woman in early middle
age was standing behind the man. Juliet did not know for sure who the man was, but she could guess: from Tim’s description, she had just been watching footage of Claudia McRae’s nephew, Guy Maichment. The woman would be her companion, Jane Halliwell. It was only natural that they would have been present at such a prestigious event, of course; it would have been stranger if they hadn’t. What Juliet had really been hoping to see were the faces of some of the other members of the audience; people known to the police, perhaps, or faces that might crop up again later in the investigation (Juliet had a good memory for faces). However, the quality of the podcast was so poor that this would not be possible. The only faces that she could see at all clearly were those of the Master of Ceremonies, the two people waiting for Claudia at the foot of the podium and Claudia herself. Watching the podcast – which Juliet’s researches had told her was of Claudia’s last public appearance – had not been a total waste of time, however. It had shown her that feelings ran high in the world which Claudia inhabited; so high, in fact, that it was conceivable that even these distinguished and respectable people would resort to violence in order to impose their opinions on others. They were like missionaries, thought Juliet: unenlightened missionaries, convinced not only that their views were the correct ones, but determined to ensure that everyone else thought so, too.